Wednesday, July 28, 2010

NASCAR team owner Jack Roush may have been attempting a go-around at the Oshkosh airport when he crashed the airplane he was piloting on Tuesday evening. “He attempted to do a go-around at the last second and was unsuccessful,” is what I was told by a source at the air show, while covering the story for the Wheels blog of The New York Times.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Please don’t call them “heroes” or “fallen angels” or any of that other pap. Last night, pilot Allan Dale Harrison and flight nurse Ryan Duke were killed in the crash of an air ambulance in Kingfisher, Oklahoma. Their flight paramedic was injured.

Friday, July 16, 2010

For years after my book Deadly Departure was published I used to wonder if everyone knew someone who died in the crash of TWA Flight 800. Either that, or someone who worked on the investigation, or saw the plane explode at 13,000 feet off the coast of Long Island on a summer night in 1996. I’d get something like one of those responses from anyone who learned that I’d written a book about the disaster.

Monday, July 12, 2010

In a case of the pot calling the kettle black, journalism has taken on aviation in a remarkably ill-thought out article called 20 Reasons to Hate the Airlines. I read about this silly little piece of writing in Time from another aviation blog, Airline Nightmare. So I find myself once again in the odd position of defending commercial air transportation, a business I do not hesitate to criticize when deserved, but which in this case has a gotten a bum rap from Time.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

An airline’s pilots are its most public representatives, so when a captain makes headlines as a collector of child pornography of record-breaking size, that’s a public relations problem. What I’m hearing is that when it comes to Colgan Airlines it may be insurmountable.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

An airline pilot in Texas has been arrested for possession and distribution of “millions and millions of images” of child pornography including photos and videos of children being sexually abused and in bondage, authorities said.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

I love the fourth of July as a summer ritual, as an opportunity to be with family and friends and most of all as an excuse to be unabashedly enthusiastic about being an American. But if there's one thing I'd like to change about this land that I love, it is the Fourth of July hot dog eating contest in Coney Island, New York.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

I spent some time the evening of July 2, enjoying spectacular weather and even more spectacular flying in my friend David Paqua's Acro Sport II airplane. I've written about David's five year project building his little two seat bi-plane in the second floor of Franklin Glass, the shop he owns in Stamford, Connecticut.